SPEAKING OF STONES
‘For Gaza shall be forsaken, and Ashkelon a desolation: they shall drive out Ashdod at the noon day, and Ekron shall be rooted up.’ ZEPHANIAH 2.4
‘Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. “But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks. “The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.” Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.'” Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”’ INVISIBLE CITIES, Italo Calvini
When they were shown the abandoned houses,
with the half-eaten food on the table,
and the children’s toys scattered as if in haste,
the upended chair, broken glass, blood smeared,
they immediately remembered their parents’ tales
of what it was like at times in the old country,
and then, it seems, immediately forgot.
***
After many, many decades he returned,
to his village in the forest, expecting
to find all the houses razed, and the ruins
blackened with fire, instead they seemed pristine,
and each of them inhabited, including
his family’s. When he explained haltingly
to a passer-by – the language returning
the more he spoke – who he was, and why
he had returned, the villager went quickly
from house to house, rousing the inhabitants.
They chased him into the forest, throwing clods,
shouting abuse he remembered so well.
***
She pretended to be a stranger, strolling
past the gates to the courtyard of the house,
studying a tourist map. The wrought iron gates
had had metal sheets welded to them
to hide the courtyard – and the bougainvillea
had been ripped from the top of the high wall
and replaced with razor wire. There was CCTV
at each vantage point of the property.
A little girl suddenly appeared
at a window on the third floor, where
the bedrooms used to be, and waved. She waved back,
and whispered, “You are standing where I once stood”.
***
The apartment block next to the beach road
is only partially collapsed. Perhaps
the next bombardment will finish the job.
Its leaning white walls and glassless windows
are like a dystopian cenotaph.
A flat-bed cart – its many passengers
huddled as if in rain – passes, pulled
by a blinkered donkey. The Phoenician sea
breaks on the crowded beach. The sand between
the road and the water line is covered
by a disparate community
of trampled plastic tents.
Jennifer Copley-May
March 29, 2024Sadly, it won’t help anyone: this poem is beautiful, and painful to read. Heart ache and tears…what good do they do?
Alan Horne
March 29, 2024For what its worth, Jennifer, I’d be more hopeful. I know poetry doesn’t stop a bullet. But I believe Irish Republicans thought Yeats had been a great help and were very angry when Heaney was careful to avoid following the same path. I think it does help to create a climate of opinion which can have an effect in the slightly longer term.
Alan Horne
March 29, 2024This is especially good, David, one of the best, because of the restraint.
Ian Craine
March 29, 2024A very good, very moving, poem. It reminds me of a less good poem I once wrote that was straining for a meaning, searching for its own significance, a series of images and events crossing a continent.
And I too have looked to Italo Calvino for inspiration, particularly ‘Invisible Cities’. His wise, enigmatic, crystal words change their meaning slightly each time I read it. As the decades pass.
Clive Watkins
April 1, 2024This is very powerful, David, and also, despite its superficial simplicity of expression, complex and quietly skilful. The following comments on the first section – I could have written as much on the other three – are digested from a longer piece I felt inclined to write but then set aside.
The first section is a single sentence. To my ears, much of its force stems from this fact – from the forward energy of the syntax and the controlled release of narrative and forensic detail, this managed in part through the fall of the line-breaks. In the second, third and fourth lines, the pacing of the observations is most effectively managed. In line 2, a single observation fills the entire line. Line 3 also presents a single detail, but now with an ostensibly tentative qualification, “as if in haste”. What is more, the rhythm of the line, with its skittling anapaestic-cum-dactylic patterns, mimes that very haste. By contrast, line 4 presents three observations and does so in a rhythm built upon (arguably) six heavily stressed syllables (“the upEnded chAIr, brOken glAss, blOOd smEAred”) organised in a declining number of syllabic units – four (“upended chair”), three (“broken glass”) and two (“blood smeared”), weighted as well by the alliterated “b” sounds.
At this point the main clause begins. This, too, is organized in a rhetorically effective way, the key move, of course, being from “immediately remembered” to “immediately forgot”, which implies that the forgetting was not just the simple opposite of the remembering. The particular phrasing is important. The last line might indicate that the observers simply turned away to other things. (I remind myself of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”: “everything turns away / quite leisurely from the disaster”.) But “it seems” encourages the thought that forgetting was a conscious act or even one that was consciously willed. Whichever it is, it is a repudiation of, a refusal to attend to, the analogy proposed between the parents’ experiences “in the old country” and the present scene of destruction: not to think about it, and therefore not to act in response to it. The qualification “it seems” perhaps signals as well the raising of an eyebrow by the speaker, as if to ask “Are they really able just to look away?” This apparent repudiation of the analogy is, so it is implied, a repudiation of the inner ethical meaning of the “parents’ tales”. Of course it is we as readers who are being asked not to look away.
I wanted to write more – about, for instance, the less than straightforward relationship between the passages from Zephaniah and Calvino to the whole poem.
A footnote or aside… In a recent email I had mentioned that I was reading “Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World” by Patrick Joyce (Allen Lane, 2024). Joyce cites in inverted commas this from Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “Every present must recognize a past that is meant in it”. This wording differs from that in my own copy of Benjamin; nonetheless, the sentiment seemed adjacent to the purposes of your poem, and so I include it here.
But enough! A fine poem, David, of a kind I could not think of writing.
Jeff Teasdale
April 2, 2024Thank you, David… this should preface every news bulletin about Gaza. What was previously lost is rarely mentioned except in abstract ‘stone-arch’ terms, although I understand that those dispossessed of their homes kept their door keys to serve both as a memory of what was lost, and as a reminder and symbol that they will return… some day.